How I Am Getting There

I started attending college August of 2005 after seeing what was ahead for me at my current job. I feel unique in my current situations. I begin to wonder what keeps me going when there doesn’t seem to be any end to the obstacles in my way. Most people give up before they even begin.

I grew up in a dysfunctional family. No one believed in me or was even interested in how well I did at school. There were no goals for me to work towards. My father didn’t want me and my mother was becoming a stranger to me. I know this doesn’t sound like much of a foundation for dreams.

One day when I had awoken in the first apartment that I had moved into, the last person that I could relate to in my family, my mother, came to me on a rainy morning and told me that she was leaving for no reason at all. I had no problem with that. She never believed in me. This made me wake up in my life. I was all alone trying to start my own family and I didn’t want a repeat of what I went through growing up. That day is when I began to believe in myself. This was the day that I began to believe that hard work and determination can get me anywhere.

I decided on college because I knew that there was little opportunity at the company I am working at. The military was out of the question. I couldn’t even imagine leaving my children behind without someone to care and provide for them if something were to happen to me. So college is more convenient. Its location is right down the road from where I work and a fifteen minute drive from where I live.

I believe this because I am in school. As much as I hate it I attend a job everyday where I make enough for my family. For once in my life I have a goal and I am not working for just the end of the week. I feel that if I had to go through life without a goal that I wouldn’t be able to keep doing this. That I am in school makes me different from statistics. I am not just a number any more.

When I look around at the others at my work I am worried. When I ask my co-workers if they would ever be attending school? They answered me with, “if the timing was right or the money was good.” Right then and there I knew that I had to be different than them. The money will never be right and the timing is now.

I believe that with determination I will achieve all the things that I want to and that hard work will get me there. All I have to do is keep quitting out of my mind. Maybe if I work hard enough I can instill the same qualities in my children and end the tradition of a broken home in my family.

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This week’s essay

Growing up in the former Yugoslavia, lawyer Djenita Pasic enjoyed the peace of her religiously diverse country. But after the fall of communism and the outbreak of the Bosnian War, Pasic was forced to reevaluate her ideas about religion and tolerance. Click here to read her essay.